A cogent argument demonstrating that a knowledgeable awareness of the rich dynamics that drive societies will better help...
Without the establishment of Islam, writes former CIA official Fuller (New Turkish Republic: Turkey As a Pivotal State in the Muslim World, 2007, etc.), the religion of the East would predominately still be Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and probably as hostile to the West as it was before the fall of Constantinople.
In focusing all its rage against Islam in the pursuit of the eradication of terrorism, the West has lost sight of the key role of “geopolitical considerations of power” over theological differences. Islamism, rather than Islam, has become just one of many ideological vehicles employed against Western interventionism, imperialism and colonialism, and the rise of its new forms of resistance—fundamentalism and terrorism—is as predictable as, say, the Reformation grievances against the Catholic Church. The author provides a broad, far-flung survey of historical currents that have fed the West-East divide, namely how the early centuries of peaceful Christian conversion in the Middle East gave way to orthodoxy and the organization of a state structure in the form of the Byzantine Empire, which broke with Rome and vigorously suppressed “a smorgasbord of heresies.” The relatively recent religion on the scene, Islam, united dissonant tribal entities of the region and opened Islam to non-Arabs, an organic development that Fuller views as “an important process of fusion.” The author considers the Crusades as an expansionist move by the West, in response to external marauding forces, and demonstrates how the breakaway elements in the Protestant Reformation “opened the door” to more liberal (or literal) interpretations of orthodoxy, in much the same way that modern Islamist movements have broken away from (or adhered more strictly to) the Islamic party line. Fuller offers a useful survey of Muslim communities in Russia, India and China, and looks at how Islam—rather than Arab nationalism, for example—has become today’s tool in resistance to the West.
A cogent argument demonstrating that a knowledgeable awareness of the rich dynamics that drive societies will better help diffuse tensions.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04119-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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